“I remember saying to Tony [Iommi], ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’”

“I have the greatest respect for Tony Iommi.”

“‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony [Iommi],’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists.Not like Tony.”

“Officially, we didn’t have a band leader.Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony [Iommi].”

“There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’”

“I’d always admired The Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.”

“We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony [Iommi] launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’ – doh, doh, doooohnnnn – but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you f**king serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dream-in’”.’‘Who – us?’ laughed Tony.‘That’s what your manager told me!’‘Jim Simpson told you that?’‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers.”